What is the Church? In writing to the Church in Corinth, Paul wants them to have a clearer understanding of what the church is in order to correct the problems that the church there is facing.

What the Church is not!

The word, ‘Church’ is used in modern speech to refer to all kinds of things, which we are often keen to point out is not really ‘the Church’ in the sense the Bible talks about it.

So, people talk about church buildings, but the church is not the building it is the people. The building is there to serve the church, but it is not the church.

People talk about the church as the institution, with bishops and clergy  and all that goes with that. Yet, the church is not an institution, it is the people. The institution is there to serve the church, but it is not the church.

People talk about ‘going to church.’ As though church is the service or event at which we gather. But church is not our gathering it is the people that gather. The meeting is there to serve the church, but it is not the church.

If those are not the church, we need to ask what is the Church! Simply,  it’s the people that follow Jesus Christ, but shouldn’t we be able to say more about what it actually is, rather than what it is not?

Well let’s look at 1 Corinthians for some help.

Introduction to 1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians, is a letter and it starts with the same pattern as most letters written in that part of the world at that time.

It tells us who it is from: Paul and his mate Sosthenes

It tells us who it is written to: The church in Corinth

There is a greeting

Then there is a thanksgiving, where Paul gives thanks to God for the church in Corinth.

Then the letter starts properly. As you read through the rest of the letter to Corinthians you discover that Paul is addressing lots of problems and issues in the church one by one, these include:

• Lack of unity or factions in the church
• Sexual immorality and marriage
• Whether or not to eat meat sacrificed to idols
• How to conduct services, including issues around Holy Communion, use of Spiritual gifts and so on
• Holding on to the reality of the resurrection from the dead.

As Paul writes about all of these topics, he is clearly challenging many dysfunctional and wrong attitudes within the church, but he is careful to frame his instructions with careful arguments and by pushing fundamental attitudes that are important.

In a sense the letter as a whole is about how we should be church. This is reflected in the introduction. Notice that the section about who the letter is written to is quite a long section. In fact when you compare it with the other letters Paul wrote this section is much larger, three times as long as most other letters and nearly twice as long as the second longest. Paul’s focus in the letter is to help the Corinthians more fully understand what the church is.

So, let’s focus on this introduction and particularly verse 2 and ask ourselves, what the church is?

What the Church is:

Holy – It belongs to God

First of all verse 2 tells us that the church belongs to God, then it tells us that it is holy. This is a common theme in the introduction to Paul’s letters. In 6 out of the 9 letter written to churches by Paul, he starts off by calling his readers holy ones or saints. But here it is stressed by adding in that they were sanctified, that means made holy!

To be made holy means to be set aside or set apart for God’s purposes. In the Old Testament, the items that were used in the temple were holy, because they were set aside to be used by God. In fact the whole nation of Israel was called, ‘Holy’, because it was set apart from the other nations to be God’s special people.

To get a grasp of this idea consider this. If you were to buy a used upright Steinway piano, then the best will cost you a lot of money. Possibly up to £100,000. But there is one used Steinway Piano that is going to be sold at an auction in March and is expected to go for nearer £1million. Why would someone pay ten times the expected price for a piano? Because this piano was owned by John Lennon. In fact it is the piano he composed Imagine on. Because of the person who had owned it, this particular piano is set apart, it is special and so it is massively more valuable and no doubt will be treated with a great deal more care than other similar pianos.

Paul writes to the church that they belong to God, and so they are set apart for God. If you are a Christian, you belong to God and have been set apart for him. Now, God is so much greater than John Lennon. John Lennon may have written a few great tunes, but God created the universe! If you are set apart for him, then you are special and valuable in unimaginable ways! This is an incredible privilege, but it also brings great responsibility.

• But will we be distinctive from the world?

If we are set apart for God, then it also means we are distinct and different from the world and we are called to live in a distinct and different way to the world around us. That is what Paul means when he says we are called to be holy.

As we go through the letter, Paul will challenge the Corinthian Christians not to act like the people in the world around, but to act differently, because they have been set apart for God.

In chapter 3, he will challenge them to stop being jealous and quarrelsome and in chapter 6 he will challenge them to stop engaging in sexual immorality. Why? In both cases because they are called to live lives distinctive from the world, but in line with God’s calling.

The church is holy and so it needs to start being holy.

United

The second thing that Paul stresses is the unity of the church. Next week we will see that one of the pressing problems with the church was a lack of unity. People focussed on different church leaders that they liked and split from those who liked different leaders.

But Paul in verse 2, emphasises the togetherness of the church, not just within Corinth, but the church everywhere. They are all one, because they all call on the same Lord, Jesus Christ. In fact, in these opening verses, Paul stresses again and again a focus on Jesus Christ, because he is the one who unites us, he is what we have in common.

More than that, though as he says in verse 9, we are called into the fellowship of the Son. As Christians when we talk about fellowship today, we often think of a friendly meeting together of Christians.

Yet the Greek word, koinonia, is much stronger than that. It sort of means that we are ‘shareholders’ in Christ. Now shareholders of a company all get to share in the profits of the company and in Christ we all get to share in what he has achieved for us in his death and resurrection.

But you can be a shareholder in a company without being involved in it and the word means more than just sharing in the benefits of Christ. It means participating with him, in his mission for the world. So, in becoming a shareholder of Christ, we become one in vision and purpose with others who are also shareholders of Christ. So the church is one and united.

• But will we see ourselves as part of the wider church?

The challenge to us is this. Do we see ourselves as part of  something bigger.

We are not to see ourselves as individual Christians choosing our own way to live the Christian life. Sadly, many today who reject the church as ‘too institutional’ are often doing so because they don’t want to conform the way they live their faith to a wider community or group. Yet, Paul in Corinthians, will constantly stress that we are to live out our faith for the sake of others – especially others in the church in a way which will not mean always living as we would choose, but living in a way that helps others, works for unity and glorifies God.

He will also keep challenging the church of Corinth not to think that they can live their life as a church in a way that is different to the way the rest of the church spread at that time around the Mediterranean lives. They as a community in Corinth are part of something bigger.

The church is holy – so we need to live lives distinctive from the world.

The church is united – so we need to live lives conforming to the fundamental vision, purpose and needs of the wider church.

Gifted – Grace

Thirdly, the church is also gifted. Paul gives thanks for the way that God has gifted the church in the thanksgiving section.

He focuses in on gifts of words, or speech and knowledge. Both of these are important and useful for the church and the people.

So, people can be gifted in forms of speech that might include, singing, praying, encouraging, speaking in tongues, preaching or prophecy. All of these are good and to be celebrated and to be given thanks for.

Knowledge too is good and important. The right knowledge can help us to see things in the right way, to understand God and what he has done in Christ more fully.

The Corinthians were somehow blessed with both people who could speak well and a good understanding, that enabled them to flourish as a church and showed that the witness of Christ Jesus was working amongst them.

• So, the gifts were good, but as we go through the letter, we will see that Paul is concerned about how the gifts are used. He wants them to use their gifts not for themselves, but for others.

Two points about the introduction show this. Firstly, the fact that Paul calls these ‘gifts’ rather than talents is important. He wants to emphasise that they are from God and therefore not something to boast about.

Secondly, it is what he doesn’t say in the thanksgiving that is important. If you compare other letters when Paul starts of with a thanksgiving for the church, the three things he gives thanks for are their faith, hope and love. None of these are mentioned here.

In the rest of the letter Paul will challenge the Corinthians about these two facts. One of my favourite phrases is in 8:1, where Paul says:

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

The idea is also picked up at the start of one of the most famous chapters in the letter:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

God gifts people in the church with all kinds of skills, but what matters more is how we use those gifts.

God may have given me the gift of preaching. The question I need to ask myself is, do I preach in order that people think better of me – that is to puff myself up, or do I preach to help people come to and grow in faith and living for God – that is love that builds up.

What hope is there for the church?

When we read the letter to the Corinthians, we may wonder whether this church has any hope. When we look at our churches today we may wonder whether there is any hope.

We often fail to live lives that are holy, in many ways we are no different to the non-Christians in the world around us.

We often resist conforming our lives for the good of the wider church community, choosing instead to do things in our own way.

We often take the gifts God has given us as a way of making ourselves look better rather than having a concern to act in love to build others up.

Is there any hope for the church? Paul says yes!! Why? Not because the church is good in itself, but because God is faithful and he will keep us firm to the end.

What is Jesus like? How does he stand out from the crowd? Jesus’s baptism comes at the start of his ministry, but it also shows us who Jesus really is.

A sermon preached at St George’s Church, Ramsgate, on Sunday 8 January 2023 by Colin Gale

On the Sunday that follows the twelve days of Christmas, there is a tradition of having one of the Gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus read, alongside other readings that are associated with the beginning of his ministry. Then in the period between Christmas and Easter, the Bible readings in church are often designed to give a quick recap of the major events in the life of Jesus as told in one or other of the Gospels, starting at his baptism and leading through to his death, resurrection and ascension.

But there is a significance to the baptism of Jesus over and above the fact that it’s the start of a story we have likely heard many times before. The Gospel reading we have heard gives us two answers to the question, ‘What is Jesus like?’, both of which turn out to be of vital importance to us today. The first way of answering the question is this: in being baptised, Jesus shows us that he is one with us. To try to explain this, I am going to tell you a story written by Søren Kierkegaard.

“Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden from a peasant family … Let everyone rejoice … for love is overjoyed when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes equal that which was unequal. Let the king’s love reign! But then there arose a sadness in the king’s soul. … He spoke to no-one about his sadness. Had he done so, everyone would doubtless have said, ‘Your Majesty, you are doing the girl a generous favour for which she could never thank you enough’, and that would have caused the king even more sorrow. Would the maiden ever be happy? Would she be able to forget what the king wished to forget, namely, that he was the king and she a former lowly maiden? … If the memory of her former state awoke within her, and … stole her thoughts away from the king … or if this memory at times crossed her soul like death crossing over a grave – where then would be the glory of their love be? She would have been happier had she remained in obscurity, loved by one of her own kind. And even if the maiden were content … the king would never be satisfied, simply because he loved her … He would much rather lose her than be her benefactor. … If equality cannot be established, love becomes unhappy and incomplete.”[1]

This story is a parable concerning the relationship between Jesus Christ and his disciple, and Kierkegaard considers options for how that relationship could be put on a healthy footing. “One way could be by the elevation of the disciple”, he writes. “God could lift the disciple up to his own exultant state and this could well divert the disciple with an everlasting joy. But God, the unselfish king, would find no satisfaction in this. He knows that the disciple, like the maiden, would be gravely deceived … bewitched by a simple change of costume”.

Kierkegaard then considers the option of unity being “brought about by God directly appearing to the disciple and receiving his or her unhindered worship. That would surely make the disciple forget about himself or herself, much in the way the king could have appeared in all his glory to the humble maiden, making her forget herself in worshipping adoration. … This might have satisfied the maiden but not the king, who desires not his own exultation but hers. Nor would she understand him, and this would make the king’s sorrow even worse.”

“Who can grasp the contradiction of this sorrow”?, asks Kierkegaard: “The unity of love will have to be brought about in some other way. If not by way of elevation, of ascent, then by a descent of the lowliest kind. God must become the equal of the lowliest. But the lowliest is one who serves others. God must therefore appear in the form of a servant. But this servant’s form is not merely something he puts on, like … a cloak … No, it is his true form. For that is the unfathomable nature of boundless love, that it desires to be equal with the beloved; not in jest, but in truth.”[2]

In appearing in the flesh as a helpless baby, and in submitting to the baptism of John, Jesus Christ truly became one with us. That is the meaning behind the short conversation between John the Baptist and Jesus as recorded by Matthew, the gospel writer. John tried to deter him, saying ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ (verse 14). The logic of his objection is something like this: You are the Messiah. Don’t try to put yourself in the place of those who are being baptized for the forgiveness of sins. You should remain a king in all your glory. To take on the role, not only of a servant, but actually of a repentant sinner, is appropriate for me, John the Baptist, and everyone I have baptised up till now, but for you, wouldn’t it be a humiliating form of play-acting?

The answer Jesus gave to this was: Let it be so now: it is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness. This must have been a mysterious saying for John to hear, and in fact we are here at the edge of the great mystery of righteousness, but at the heart of this saying of Jesus was his determination to stoop so low, precisely in order to raise sinners heavenward. The New Testament tells us that ‘Jesus Christ, the Righteous One’, is the propitiation for our sins’ (I John 2:2), and this is true only because he ‘was willing to humble himself and put himself in our place, so that our sins became his, and his righteousness became ours. ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin’, the apostle Paul writes, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus died and rose again for our sake, but he also lived the perfect life for us, that we have been unable to live for ourselves. Because he is one with us, he is able to bring righteousness to the nations, and ultimately to us.

That identification is genuine, it is not play-acting, and nowhere is it clearer than in the baptism of Jesus. For as long as Jesus retained all the privileges of his Messiah-ship and divinity, he had no need of John’s baptism of repentance. But in accepting baptism, he humbly descended to be one with all of us who need, and know we need, the forgiveness of sins. Without his baptism, and the radical identification with sinners it entailed, the death and resurrection of Jesus could be of no benefit to us. So it is his baptism that provides the vitally important assurance we need that not only is he like us, he is actually one with us.

So that is the first way in which our Gospel reading answers the question ‘What is he like?’, and here is the second part of the answer: immediately after being baptised, Jesus shows us that he is one with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. You may remember hearing the words of the Lord to the prophet Isaiah in our Old Testament lesson this morning: ‘This is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight: I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring righteousness to the nations’. (I said ‘…righteousness to the nations’, in the Old Testament reading we heard ‘ …justice…’, but in the thought-world of the Old and New Testaments, those two concepts are fused together.) The fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy is in our Gospel reading. ‘As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased”.’

Here we are at the edge of another great mystery, the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and what we see here is the closest possible identification of Jesus Christ with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, the closest possible identification that is consistent with ongoing differentiation. If the Holy Spirit had not descended upon Jesus at his baptism, Jesus would not have been in a position to say, as he did say in John chapter 15, that “when the Spirit of truth comes, whom I will send you from the Father, he will testify on my behalf”. And if the Father had not said “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” at Jesus’ baptism, Jesus would not have been in a position to say, as he does say in John chapters 10 and 14, ‘I and the Father are one. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’. At the baptism of Jesus and at Pentecost, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit act in concert and in concord. They act as one, because they are one. It’s not just that Jesus is like the Father and the Spirit – rather, he is at one with them.

This is of vital importance to us, because it means that through Christ “we have access to the Father by one Spirit”, as Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2. Any authentic experience we may have of God is simultaneously through Christ, with the Father, and by the Spirit.

Practically, what this means is that it is not “possible to be in the Spirit without being in the Son” or to “have a valid relationship to God that is not mediated by Jesus, or to try to reach the Father by some other spiritual path than the one true and living way he has given us in Jesus”.[3] Because the three persons of the Trinity are one substance, and one in will and purpose, Christians may show tolerance, hospitality, humility and respect towards adherents of other world religions, certainly, but we cannot regard those religions as “independent manifestations of the Spirit that can be set alongside God’s self-manifestation in Christ”[4] on an equal footing. That would be to divide the unity of the persons of the Godhead.

Likewise it is not possible to be in the Son without also being in the Spirit, because “it is through the Spirit that we come to believe the gospel and to receive all that the Father has done for us in the Son … None of this is a possibility for, or an achievement of, our own inherent spirituality … it is a gracious work of God within us”.[5]

Because the three persons of the Trinity are one substance, and one in will and purpose, practically what this means for us is that the Son and the Spirit do not operate in silos to oversee different stages of the Christian life. It is not the case that we “receive salvation from sin from Christ crucified and then, having fulfilled certain further conditions … go on to a further stage in which we are baptised in the Holy Spirit into the fullness of God’s life and power”.[6] That too would be to divide the unity of the persons of the Godhead. On the contrary, the beginning, the middle and the end of the Christian life is the enjoyment of “access to the Father through Christ by one Spirit”.

Because the three persons of the Trinity are one substance, and one in will and purpose, practically what this means for us is that the Holy Spirit will not be encountered via “introspective inner journeys into ourselves” – once again, that would be to divide the unity of the persons. Instead, he will be found by an “outward journey beyond ourselves into Christ”[7] – the incarnate, crucified and risen Lord of history, from whom the Spirit of God comes to us – or rather, we will be found by him and led on this journey.

The baptism of Jesus deserves to be remembered on one appointed Sunday near the start of the year, because it shows us what Jesus is like, and why it matters. First, by his baptism he has shown himself to be one with us, and he has shown us that the true form of God is that of a servant. Because he has stooped so tenderly, he can lift our humanity to the heights of his throne in union with him. Second, having been baptised, Jesus is shown to be one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Because of that unity, we may be brought into the life of God the Father, not via one route out of many possible routes, nor by a mystical inner journey, nor by a two-step second-blessing process, but always, only and ever through Christ by the Holy Spirit. And this truly is the triumph of God’s love.

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[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations (Plough Publishing House, 2002), pp. 91-92.

[2] Ibid. pp. 92-93.

[3] Tom Smail, ‘The Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity’, in C. Seitz (ed.), Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism (Brazos Press, 2001).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.